


A Game No One Wins

by triedunture



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Depression, Gen, Not A Fix-It, Suicidal Thoughts, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-08
Updated: 2019-05-08
Packaged: 2020-02-28 07:08:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18751501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/triedunture/pseuds/triedunture
Summary: A fill-in for the five year jump in Endgame. Steve visits New Asgard to see Thor.





	A Game No One Wins

New Asgard is nice. If you like isolated, undeveloped areas donated by Scandinavian countries who may or may not have been guilted into the decision.

Yeah, Steve made a phone call. Probably not the only reason the governments had caved, but he'd wanted to help even then.

He wants to help now, which is— Well, he's prepared to be disappointed. If the last four years have shown him anything, it's that you can't expect too much. He adjusts the strap of his duffle bag on his shoulder and walks the rest of the way down the winding, freshly paved road to the Asgardian fishing village. Bruce had suggested he not go alone—"He knows me a little better; I should come with."—but in the end it hadn't worked out. Air travel was still touch-and-go what with fuel, air traffic control, spare parts all suddenly grinding to a halt. This was personal, not a global emergency, so borrowing the jet was out of the question. Nat held that precious resource tight—as she should.

So when a ticket to Oslo popped up for sale to the highest bidder, Steve had thrown some of his old S.H.I.E.L.D. paychecks at it. What did money matter anymore anyway?

It's cold here in New Asgard even though it's springtime. The air is chilled and wet, salt spray from the sea giving everything a white crust like it's being eaten away by time. These wood framed houses and outbuildings are only a few years old, some even newer, and yet they look like they could serve as the backdrop to some strange fairytale.

Or a horror story, Steve thinks.

He stops to talk to the people he meets, introduces himself with simply his first name, asks if they can point him in the right direction. They all hesitate before directing him to the docks, where he finds a woman who is not Thor. Apparently leadership is in flux around here.

She turns to watch his approach, her hands still reeling a heavy length of water-logged rope into a coil. Steve eyes the line; it must weigh hundreds of pounds soaked yet she isn't breaking a sweat. Truly of Asgard, then.

"I don't think we've met," he says. His hand reaches out, and after a moment of dark eyes flicking over his face, she stands to shake it. "I'm Rogers."

"Ugh." Her face falls. "He said you'd come."

Steve tries again. "You must be—"

"The Valkyrie, yes." She shrugs on a thick jacket that had been draped over a crate and nods with her chin through the mist that clings to shore. "I'm supposed to turn you away. By force if need be. And certainly not tell you that Thor lives in that one, right there, with the black door."

Steve picks out the black door from its little row of neighbors. Red doors, yellow ones, green, blue. Thor's is the only black one.

He turns back to the woman, a frown creasing his forehead. "Sorry. I don't want to cause trouble."

She shrugs, stoops to tend to the tangle of her fishing nets. "He won't listen to me anymore. Might as well let you have a try. Just don't—" She sighs, looks up at him with a fierce glint in her eye. "Just don't mock him. If you do, I will beat you bloody. Are we clear, little mortal?"

"As crystal," he tells her.

She turns back to her work, speaking now to the ground. "Then go. He's in there; he never leaves. But he might not answer the door."

"Noted. Thanks."

The Valkyrie dismisses him with a wave, and Steve makes his way to the seaside lane, stepping over buckets of sleek fish and little piles of bones picked apart by gulls. The scent of dead things is overwhelmed by the smell of coming rain. Steve pulls up the hood of his all-weather parka as the first drops patter into his hair.

Counseling had been Sam's idea. That is to say, the dreams of Sam. Steve sees him pretty often when he closes his eyes at night. Bucky too, and others, but Sam had always been the talkative one so it made sense that in dreams, he'd be the one to chat with Steve. They talk about how to go forward, the right thing to do, where to start when everything is so broken and everyone is so lost.

"Man, it doesn't matter," Sam's voice would say in Steve's ear late at night. "Pick a place and start there. Could be the littlest, tiniest thing. Just do something."

He'd also dreamed they were stuck in the glass frames of the Snow White animation studio and being chased by a bear. Dreams don't always make sense. But his memory of Sam—that had made a lot of sense.

Sam Wilson would have helped people as best he could, so that's what Steve starts doing. Informal little gatherings at first, word of mouth or messages sprayed on abandoned subway cars and brick walls. Meet here on Tuesdays at this time. You don't have to give your name.

He'd wondered at first if he could handle it—all the pain and trauma that strangers brought to him. They sat in circles and stared at him with hollow eyes. He would hear a dozen stories that each broke his heart and he'd think, okay, I've heard the worst of it, I can do this. Then the next week would bring another round of fresh wounds ten times worse. Every week, it's worse and worse and worse.

He keeps at it.

Because who else is willing to listen? When everyone on the face of the planet has suffered so terribly, when no one is spared the horror, who else is going to listen to ordinary people pour themselves out if not Steve?

Didn't make it easy. At his lowest, he'd go for a run.

If Sam could do this, he'd pant as he sprinted, I can do this.

Fake it till you make it, Sam'd always said.

I can do this, Steve repeats over and over. He sits in circles. He listens. He boards a plane. He walks to the sea. He knocks on a black door.

I have to do this, he thinks as he knocks again. He'd do it for me.

He waits. There's no answer. "Thor?" he calls, and knocks a third time. "It's me. Steve." He tries the handle. It isn't locked. Why would it be? There's hardly anything around here.

"It's okay, I'm coming in," is all the warning he gives as he pushes open the door with his shoulder. It catches on something on the floor, drags it across the wooden boards with a screech. Steve cranes his neck to peer behind the door. It's a few kegs, empty by the roll of them.

That's not good.

He finds Thor in what must be meant to be a living room, though it's impossible for it to live up to its name at the moment. There's very little furniture, just a bare mattress on the ground surrounded by the detritus of a life that's come to a standstill. Thor lays sprawled there on his back. Steve can see his chest rise and fall in the dim light.

Thor has always been the strongest of them all, but now? Oh, he doesn't look the way Steve remembers. Thick, oily guilt wells in his stomach. He should have come sooner.

"Hey." He sits gingerly at Thor's side and shakes him by the shoulder. By the smell and the state of his stained, mismatched pajamas, Thor hasn't been bathing. His hair and beard are wildly long, unkempt things.

One amber eye cracks open, the blue one still squeezed shut.

"Morning," Steve whispers. It's past six in the evening, but who's counting.

Thor regards him in silence for a long moment, squinting with that one oddball eye as if trying to determine if he's real. Steve knows the feeling. He lets him look.

"Still shaving the beard," Thor grunts. "Good. Didn't suit you." He struggles to sit up, then seems to think better of it and flops back into place.

"Guess not." Steve wets his lips. He's forcing himself not to stare. "Thor—"

"Brunhilde was supposed to send you away." Thor's voice takes on a whining tone. "I didn't ask you to come. Didn't want you to come." He rummages around in the garbage piled against the edge of the mattress, picking up and shaking glass bottles in turn, flinging them aside when their emptiness becomes apparent. "Now you're here and you're going to feel _sorry_ for me." He says it like a curse.

"I'm not here out of pity," Steve says.

"No. Sense of duty, though. Maybe." Thor growls in frustration as his search bears no fruit. The last empty bottle cracks against the far baseboard and rolls into a corner. "You want to make me better."

"It doesn't have to be like this for you." There had been a whole speech. A carefully crafted script that he followed in his little groups. But being here—and maybe it's because he knows Thor, maybe that's why it's different—seeing the ferocity of his pain makes Steve falter.

This guy used to be a god.

The blue eye finally opens, but now the other one gets shut away. Thor levers himself up, hot, stale breath in Steve's face.

"What do you know." He stands with some difficulty—Steve can't tell what's giving him the most trouble, the drunkenness, the dim light, the clinging grasp of sleep. All of it, probably. Thor fights through it to stagger through a door. Steve moves to follow, then sees it's a bathroom and stands facing away as Thor relieves himself.

It takes a very long time.

Thor picks up his narrative thread as he pisses. "Hilde tried, you know. To make me well. She's experienced horrid defeat too, you know. Has lost _so_ much. But I told her, I'm not going to do yoga or whatever it is that's worked for her." The stream slows to a trickle, then a few drops. "I'm glad it did, really I am. But it's not for me."

Steve clears his throat as Thor flushes, turning around again. "I have these dreams sometimes— I go running to clear my head."

Thor pokes his shaggy head out of the bathroom and gives a cruel smile. Steve nearly takes a step backward. A look like that, it doesn't belong on Thor's face.

"Captain," Thor enunciates slowly, "I am not going to take up fucking jogging." He sweeps back into the dreary living room, kicking at things on the floor until his foot finds a keg full and immobile. "You should leave now. You tried, didn't you? Your part's done."

"Hold on." Steve grabs him by the arm to stop him from stooping to pick up what looks like ten gallons of home brew. "I'm not giving up that easily." He regrets the words as soon as he sees the reaction on Thor's face.

"Ah, like I did?" Thor is pale with grief. "Tell me, Rogers, how would you have hung on through all this?" He advances on Steve, and in that moment, Steve can taste a storm on his tongue, and he remembers just how dangerous this man can be.

"Wait—"

"The grace you would have exhibited!" Thor roars. "After losing your country, your planet, your anchor, your entire _family_! Your—" His throat works. "Your everything."

"I don't have all the answers for that, okay?" Steve's back is flat against the wall now, crowded against it by Thor. "I'm not saying I've got any. But this?" He gestures helplessly to the shadowed room, the dirty floor. "You deserve better than this, Thor. Don't you want something better than this?"

Thor's face works through a few emotions before settling on bleary puzzlement. "You think I have a choice?" His laugh is brittle, hopeless. "Oh, Steven." He claps a heavy hand to Steve's shoulder, just shy of bruising, and turns away.

Steve's ashamed to be breathing a little easier. "What do you mean?"

Thor fiddles with his hands, fingers searching for and rubbing along the lengths of each other. It's a nervous tick Steve recognizes from guys in group. It usually accompanies a long-kept truth.

"I tried drugs," Thor says after awhile spent in silence. "Mortal drugs, mortal alcohol, nothing kept me...under enough." He glances at Steve, corners of his mouth lifting for one second before falling. "The Asgardians that survived are blessed with ingenuity. They brew these for me now." He nudges a keg with his bare toe. "A steady supply. At first Hilde tried to stop it but I explained to her—" His eyes are twin gleams in the dark. "I explained to them all that if I wasn't kept in a twilight fog, I would pick up my axe and start tearing this pitiful, useless world apart." He looks up now, a wide, pained smile on his face, tears in his mismatched eyes. "And I do not want to do that."

Oh, Steve realizes. He's still a hero.

Steve goes to him, touches his arm. "That's not going to happen."

"Mm." Thor nods absentmindedly. "You would stop me, of course."

"No," Steve says, "you would stop yourself. You already are."

"I don't want to hurt anyone," Thor sobs.

Steve puts a hand in his matted yellow hair, brings him down to cry against his shoulder. "I know." He waits. This part never gets easier. He hates to bring it up, but it's a necessary thing. "What about you? Are you thinking of killing yourself?"

"I considered it," Thor whispers, both big hands clutching at Steve now. "It would be best, I think. But I fear I would never reach Valhalla if I did. And I want to see my mother again. I want to see my brother—" He falls into quiet tears.

Steve's heart pounds. Thor's people might have some strange beliefs, but if that's what's keeping Thor alive, Steve isn't about to question it.

"Okay," he says, and lets Thor cry. "Okay."

He stays in New Asgard for a little over a week. On the surface, not much changes in that time. Thor still drinks—Steve's not going to take that away from him either, not now—and stays inside his house and doesn't do much else. Yet a couch appears in the living room, one that Thor had chosen from the Ikea catalog himself, and that Steve had helped him put together.

A video game console is installed. Steve's suggestion again, Thor's decision ultimately. The games can be a little violent for Steve's tastes but it's the only thing that gets Thor off his mattress and on the couch some days.

A couple of the aliens that came planetside with the Asgardians show up. Steve asks if they'd like to learn to play the games Thor's been trying out. They're funny, they make Thor laugh. They show him how he can talk to other players around the world. It's more socializing than Thor's done in years, Steve's pretty sure.

Thor's centuries-old. Even a human would need time. Thor just needs more of it.

"You know I'm not ever going to get better," Thor tells Steve one morning over mugs of their preferred drinks. Coffee, black, for Steve.

Steve hides his smile as he sips. Swallows. Repeats what he's been telling Thor since he walked through the door.

"That's okay."    
  
  
  
  
  


 


End file.
